Gender Neutral Language - To Use Man Or Human?
Gender Neutral Language - To Use Man Or Human
?I know someone who changed all the instances of "man" to "human" in a prayer called The Great Invocation in order to be politically correct and gender neutral. I used to have issues with the word man to mean human as well, but more recently I felt there was something wrong with that and began to learn about the earliest meanings of the words man and human, and feel for myself what is really going on. I concluded that gender neutral language is not applicable to the use of the word man to describe humans collectively.
MAN:
Man does not (originally) mean male.
Man in original Sanskrit means: to think, imagine, know, understand, contemplate, comprehend.
HU:
Hu is apparently an ancient name for God.
In Sanskrit hu means: a sacrifice, sacrifice to, an offering to a deity, worship or honour, an exclamation, invoking, to be offered or sacrificed.
HUMAN:
So putting the threads together, hu-man encompasses meanings like:
o to think, know, contemplate, imagine and understand God
o God's thought, knowledge, understanding, contemplation, imagination, etc.
o a thinking, knowing, understanding, contemplating sacrifice or offering to God
o to worship or honor thinking, knowing, understanding, contemplating, imagination
o an exclamation of thought, knowledge, understanding, contemplation, imagination, etc.
o invoking thought, knowledge, understanding, contemplation, imagination, etc.
Do you get the overall feeling? It's more revealing than the individual sentences.
HEART AND MIND AND HAND:
It is interesting to note that the hand is the tool of the mind, and the French word for hand is main pronounced "man".
Look at words like: manual, manipulate, manoeuvre, manufacture, manage - they all refer to functions of the hand expressing the intent of the mind (and heart), thoughts and imagination.
According to the spiritual healers and esoteric philosophers we have heart chakras in our hands.
In Sanskrit note that H is pronounced ha.
Mana, manas means: mind.
ManaH means: heart.
ManasaH means: more than the mind.
Isn't it interesting that when you combine heart and mind you get more than the mind, ie. mind-heart or thought-heart?
In the book entitled Brotherhood by one of the old Masters (in the Agni Yoga series) it says:
"Pay attention to the formula - thought-heart. It will not be understood at once; let us not coerce anyone's thinking, nevertheless some will propel their attention in this direction - it leads to Brotherhood" (The term: Brotherhood meaning the harmonious, loving unity of all humanity, via our inner heart).
Sanskrit is a very old language, going way back B.C. Languages we now consider old such as Latin and ancient Greek are actually the youngsters and don't really help with the deepest origins of meanings the way Sanskrit can. For example the word "human" begins to appear in modern languages in 1250 AD as meaning "earthly". And so it does in a way, however by 1250 AD we had certainly lost the plot of our original meaning as humans - an expression of the divine mind-heart!
So what I've concluded is that the use of the word: man to refer to a human or humanity collectively, is not a gender bias but only a true expression of what we fundamentally are.
Copyright Dianne Trussell 2010
Dianne Trussell